Artist, writer and animator Ben Wickey has turned the infamous Salem Witch Trials into a graphic novel, titled More Weight, concentrating on the life of Giles Corey, who was pressed to death during the trials. While working on it, Wickey learned that he was the descendant of one of the people hanged as a witch. Cemetery Dance spoke to Wickey about his personal connection to this story, how he did his research, and how he approached adapting history into graphic novel form.
Stick around after the interview for a couple of preview pages from More Weight.
(Interview conducted by Danica Davidson)
CEMETERY DANCE: Can you tell us about your personal connection with the Salem Witch Trials?
BEN WICKEY: I had been fascinated with the witchcraft trials since I was in my early teens. My middle school was in the town of Danvers, Massachusetts, which was once known as Salem Village. This is where the accusations of witchcraft, and the well-documented preliminary interrogations, took place in 1692. When my school would take us out for field trips, Salem was the closest city. I grew up on Cape Ann in the town of Rockport, about 30 minutes north of Salem. I had always known Salem as a beautiful and fascinating city, a microcosm of its own, where some of my nearest and dearest friends still live. Exploring the city on school field trips, however, provided an entirely new dimension to the city. Whether exploring the House of the Seven Gables or exploring any of the numerous wax museums, the city’s strange and troubled history made a profound impression upon me. Later I would fall in love with the writings of Salem’s favorite son, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and study the events of Salem’s tragic and horrific past which had haunted him in the nineteenth century.
Halfway through the process of writing and drawing this book, a cousin of mine in Michigan informed me that I was the 9th great grandson of Mary Easty, one of the last innocent people to be hanged as an alleged witch in 1692. This revelation certainly contributed to my obsessive and passionate mission to make the book as true and respectful as possible. Mary Easty ‘s scenes were especially moving to draw. Many people today are descendants of someone hanged in Salem, and I hope my book encourages people to embrace their ancestors with the knowledge that no witchcraft EVER took place in Salem. Often misunderstood in today’s pop culture, this was an event which remains a consistently relevant lesson, and a major reason why the United States is not a theocracy. As actual witch hunts still blight the earth in India and Africa, and as people are torn away from their families here in the United States, we would do well to remember Salem’s tragic episode as it actually happened.
I also take some time at the end of the book to examine the ways in which the city of Salem has dealt with its past 330 years later, with some criticism for the rather tasteless “witch city” brand the city has embraced since the 19th century.
How did you research More Weight?
Since I began this project as a comic book adaptation of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s play, Giles Corey of the Salem Farms, my initial ambitions for the book were very simple. But slowly, over the years, the witchcraft trials became an obsession for me, and I made a point of reading every book on the subject and striving for a level of historical accuracy never before seen in pop-culture portrayals of the event. I researched while I wrote and drew, which embarrassed me until I learned that that’s how David McCullough worked, to retain a spirit of curiosity in the final book. I poured over the plethora of primary source documents from 1692, occasionally holding some in my bare hands, and reading what each historian had made of the information they held. A careful study of clothing, household items, architecture, and the very land in which these terrible events took place were also needed to achieve the book that now exists. There is a large appendix at the end of the book, in which I provide all my research notes and citations. Compiling all that felt like a book in and of itself!
What was the creative process?
I fashioned scenes from historical material like letters and court transcripts, and constructed the private “behind closed doors” scenes from the facts and my own skills as a storyteller. The 17th century scenes were drawn with pens, ink washes, and graphite, before being scanned. There are also 19th century scenes between Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and 21st century scenes of modern day Salem which I drew on a cintiq. The entire book was hand-lettered by myself. The 17th century scenes are drawn in a cartoonish style, while the later eras are drawn in a more photorealistic style.
How did you approach telling the story of the witch trials in graphic novel form?
This was an event which involved hundreds of people, and so it was necessary for me to focus on only the key figures: the victims and their accusers. The main characters are Giles Corey, a cantankerous, eighty-year-old farmer, his great-souled wife, Martha, and her son of mixed race, Benoni. Each character in the book has to have a specific design, so that the reader can keep track of them. In the decade that I wrote and drew this book, I always put off the more disturbing and violent pages for another day. Drawings of the brutal executions, including Giles Corey ‘s particularly gruesome death, were of course things I needed for the book to properly convey the gravity of the event. However, I took no joy in drawing them. By the time the day came when I had to reluctantly draw Giles Corey being pressed to death for refusing to stand trial, I had been drawing him for nine years. I had drawn his baptism in England, his marriages, his children growing up, and a lifetime of various misdemeanors (including murder.) After nine years, it was hard to say goodbye to the old bastard!
Where can people learn more about you and your work?
My Instagram is where I usually provide updates on projects and appearances at cons. My stop-motion animated films, including the Rondo Award-winning The House of the Seven Gables, are all on my YouTube channel.
